Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Friday, July 27, 2012

Pigs, Droughts, and Corn-a-Holing You

Droughts happen. And they're not good for anyone.

But keep the potential hardship to producers and consumers in perspective. “U.S. farmers face this drought in their strongest financial position in history, buoyed by less debt, record-high grain and land prices, plus greater production and exports,” reported Christine Stebbins of Reuters, after a thorough canvassing of industry and government experts. Farm losses should be far smaller than those suffered in the last big drought 24 years ago.

In fact, the Agriculture Department estimates that government-subsidized crop insurance covers more than 80 percent of farmland planted with major field crops — at least two of which, wheat and cotton, appear pretty much unaffected by the dry weather anyway. Dairy farms are the least likely to be in drought-ravaged areas, the USDA reports. And many of them enjoy federally subsidized insurance against rising feed costs. --RedState quoting the WaPo

Notwithstanding the facts above, we see a bi-partisan Pig Coalition hard at work.

Seeing their political stock rapidly diminish, the bipartisan coalition of government-run agriculture took a page out of Rahm Emanuel’s playbook and decided not to let the crisis of the summer drought go to waste. They are using evocative imagery of dead crops and the fear of higher food prices to shove this $957 billion behemoth through Congress.

Hmmmm...what could POSSIBLY be the problem?

...the single most damaging factor in distorting the crop market, particularly the corn crop, is the government’s ethanol policy.

Over the past decade, ethanol has been the poster child for the worst aspects of big-government crony capitalism. The ethanol industry has used the fist of government to mandate that fuel blenders use their product, to subsidize their production with refundable tax credits, and to impose tariffs on more efficient sugar-based ethanol from Brazil. These policies have distorted the market for corn to such a degree that 44% of all corn grown in the country is diverted towards motor fuel blends.

Not only does Corn-A-Holing reduce your fuel economy, thus costing you money. Now the Pig Coalition wants you to pay AGAIN to make up for farm losses (which, by the way, are largely based on un-audited "statements" submitted by.......farmers.)

You'll see the stark raving Fear of Truth oozing from the pores of Republicans in the farm belt over the next few weeks.

Give them another Fear--primary the bastards who vote for this Pig Bill.

We treat the American farmer like it's 1930 and we're going to starve to death if these people don't receive their cheap crop insurance, ethanol subsidy, tax breaks and $7/bushel corn.

If the American farmer didn't save some of their windfall profits from the last decade in order to cover crop losses in 2012 (or buy ultra cheap crop insurance), tough cookies. Maybe they'll have to sell off a few acres of their wildly inflated land values to cover it.

There's going to be no such thing as "cheap crop insurance" very shortly. Insurance companies employ the sharpest math minds there are. Do you think their actuaries, after looking at the increasing severity of and decreasing time between extreme weather events, will allow their employers to deny the existence of a warming future? I don't.